The Magicians - 'The Source of Magic'

"I have serious questions about this school's standards of pastoral care."

Quentin is questioned about the Beast's attack in the shattered remains of the classroom, since apparently sensitivity is something that happens to other schools, and we get some flashbacks revealing that the Dean - not dead, although somewhat occularly challenged now - had a watch which broke the time freeze when Quentin apparated it to his own hand. Kady (or Margo? Too many interchangeable brunettes) then clouts the Beast with 'battle magic' and Alice uses some sort of fumigation spell to start killing off his moths. He retreats through the mirror and Penny smashes it.

What follows is a slightly circular process in which Quentin is faced with expulsion while Julia is locked in a walk-in fridge with another hopeful 'hedge witch' to see if she has the chops to join hedge witch local #666. The bulk of the time goes on Quentin, but it's Julia who is more interesting in this episode, proving herself willing to carve up a corpse to cast a heat spell and take the lock off a door with a pair of scissors if need be, while Quentin mostly mopes about being brain-wiped and gets into a fight with Penny over the latter refusing to lie about accidentally opening the door to the thing that killed one guy and ate the Dean's eyes out of his head. Seriously, when eyes are being eaten, you don't get to call on the student omerta.

The other candidate, Marina, turns out to be the leader of the group, a level 50 hedge witch, which means that she has a lot of star tattoos. There is no other indication of whether 50 is truly exception or just the best in the area or what. In fact, there are a lot of gaps in the theory so far, which is frustrating, because what there is in the magic is good. In particular, the complex finger gestures used to cast spells are very visually distinct.

Rapey recruiter Pete can fuck off, but so far the Hedge Witches are a little more intriguing than grown up Hogwarts, at least until 'specialist' Eliza - the woman who gave Quentin the lost Fillory book - reveals that he won't be expelled because he needs to learn to defeat the Beast; this edge of desperation gives the school a bit more nuance. Also in the 'more interesting than Quentin' file, we learn that Kady is being blackmailed by Marina to be her insider at Brakebills, that Eliot killed a guy one time, and that Penny was taught magic by a voice in his head that he now knows to have been the Beast. Alice reveals that she broke into Brakebills to learn magic and find out what happened to her brother, which is supposed to be impossible.

All things considered, 'Unauthorized Magic' and 'The Source of Magic' (referring to Eliot's explanation that power comes not from talent, but from pain) basically form the awkwardly ill-balanced halves of a perfectly good opening two- or even three-parter, and suffer from being paced as two episodes. The characters aren't quite established enough for transformative revelations yet. "Kady's working for the Hedge Witches? But she seemed so... one-dimensional." There was also nothing in here to compare to the Beast's barnstorming entrance.